Backpack Food Programs Can’t Wait to Get Their Hands on Our New Breakfast Meal!

People are raving about Feeding Children Everywhere’s delicious new line of Breakfast Bites: Apple Pie Oats. With real apple, Scottish oats, puffed brown rice and nutmeg, it’s packed with the nutrition kids need to start their day.

It can also be placed discreetly in the backpack of a child going hungry here in the U.S.

Dawn Hayes is a coordinator for the Backpack Buddies program in Rome, Georgia, which provides vulnerable children with bags of backpackable food to take home from school. According to Hayes, one of the biggest challenges for backpack food programs is finding breakfast foods that are both nutritious and portable enough to fit into students’ backpacks.

“The hardest items for us to get are breakfast items,” she explains. “Most of the items available are packed with sugar and aren’t very healthy. We’re so excited that Feeding Children Everywhere is doing a healthy breakfast, because kids can’t learn when they’re hungry.”

More than 13 million children right here in America wake up every day not knowing where their next meal will come from.

Knowing breakfast is the foundation for a productive day, many schools offer free breakfast for low-income students. But these programs have historically low participation rates.

“One of the biggest issues is the stigma,” Hayes explains. “Most of these kids are not going to come in and say, ‘My mom and dad don’t have money for food.’ So they go hungry.”

Research shows that without a healthy breakfast, many of these children will struggle with lower test scores and increased behavioral problems. That struggle leads to lower graduation rates and the disparity creates a generational cycle of poverty.

Hayes is seeing this firsthand at Backpack Buddies:

“We’ve had teachers say that kids would come in and fall asleep with their heads on the desks on Monday. They have beds to sleep in, they just didn’t have food in their stomachs, so there’s no energy.”

Feeding Children Everywhere launched its National Breakfast Program to help end the cycle of poverty in the United States and provide hope and a brighter future for millions of children.

Just like FCE’s beloved Red Lentil Jambalaya meal, the new Breakfast Bites will be packaged by volunteers at corporations, businesses, universities, faith-based organizations and more and distributed with dignity through food pantries and backpack programs at schools.

Want to help put an end to childhood hunger in America, beginning with the most important meal of the day?